Strandloper

Alan Garner

Loosely based on historical events, Strandloper tells the story of
William Buckley, who is transported to Australia, escapes, becomes an
Aboriginal law-giver and healer, and returns to England thirty years
later. This is a plot with obvious potential, but what Garner does
with it is completely original: in Strandloper he has produced one of
the most innovative novels in years.

The immediately startling thing about Strandloper is its language.
It is dominated by dialogue (and some stream of consciousness) and Garner
reproduces a multitude of voices with their colloquial idioms: we begin
in the Cheshire countryside, with characters speaking dialect English;
on board ship we add to this thieves' cant, Irish brogue, and even Latin;
and in Australia words from various Aboriginal languages. Throughout
there is repetition of nursery rhymes, chants, and nonsense syllables,
which also takes some getting used to. The narration, in unadorned
modern English, complements this nicely and has a poetry of its own.

What makes Strandloper really extraordinary, however, is its
ethnographic depth. Enmeshing the reader in an alien culture is never
easy, but Garner attempts it twice in the one short novel (eighteenth
century rural England being in some ways as foreign to the modern
reader as Aboriginal Australia). Garner's earlier children's novels
demonstrated his affinity for English folklore and myth; in Strandloper
he demonstrates an equally impressive feel for Aboriginal culture.
Even more ambitiously, he hints at links between the two, at a shared
pattern. Hubris would be a reasonable accusation, were it not that he
succeeds so well!

This probably makes Strandloper sound unreadable, but that is not the
case at all. Once one adapts to its rhythms and its language and the
intensity of the engagement it demands, it moves along as compellingly
as any mundane thriller could. Though it is finished all too quickly,
when the end is reached it is as if five hundred pages rather than two
have passed, so much does it hold. Strandloper is definitely out of
the ordinary.